LippInc

Save Before Compact — Communication skill for Claude Code

Communication community

Claude Code skill: save what the compaction is about to eat.

How to install Save Before Compact

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open LippInc/save-before-compact and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Save Before Compact does

Claude Code skill: save what the compaction is about to eat. Sweeps the chat for unsaved decisions, facts and open questions before you compact, writes RESUME.md first, reports last.

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README

save-before-compact: save what the compaction is about to eat

A small Claude Code skill. Right before you compact or clear a long chat, it sweeps the conversation for decisions, facts, corrections and open questions that are not yet in any file, saves them, writes a short `RESUME.md` handoff for the next session, and only then tells you what it did. When there is nothing to save, it says so and writes nothing.

Install (two minutes)

Copy the folder containing `SKILL.md` to `~/.claude/skills/save-before-compact/`, so that `~/.claude/skills/save-before-compact/SKILL.md` exists (create the folders if they do not). Restart Claude Code once if `~/.claude/skills/` did not exist before. Then `/save-before-compact` runs it, and Claude will also pick it up on its own when you say you are about to compact or clear.

Add one line to the project's `CLAUDE.md` so the next session actually reads the handoff (Claude Code loads `CLAUDE.md` at every start and re-injects the project-root copy after compaction):

If RESUME.md (or .claude/RESUME.md) exists in the project root, and its first line starts with RESUME and does not say CLOSED, read it first.

Add `RESUME.md` and `.claude/checkpoints/` to your `.gitignore` unless you want the handoff committed.

Optional: [hooks/](hooks/) has three PowerShell scripts that surface `RESUME.md` automatically, archive the transcript before each compaction, and tell a session that was auto-compacted to run a recovery sweep. Windows-tested only; read the disclosure in that folder before installing the archive hook.

Why it exists

I audited my own Claude Code transcripts in August 2026 expecting to find leaks, things I had said in chat that never made it to disk. Mostly there were none: across three projects, 6 of 6 traced decisions in one corpus and 8 of 8 in another were already in a file, usually within minutes, and the third ran about 85 to 90 percent. What was consistently getting lost was narrower and a little embarrassing: